I ran pctools spyware doctor and cleaned everything out. I then reran the tool and got a clean bill of health. Then I visited the main site page at http://www.slickdeals.net

I followed that immediately by running another scan and spyware doctor identified 19 threats of varying severity.

Specifically,

5 Adware Advertising cookies - threat level low
12 Application Tracking cookies - threat level low and
2 Spyware.Known_Bad_Sites - threat level High

(LCLK.qksrv.net and S.qksrv.net)

I assume this has something to do with ads but I don't like the fact that something is getting installed on my computer that a leading spyware utility identifies as a serious threat.
(see threat details here: http://www.pctools.com/mrc/infections/id/Spyware.Known_Bad_Sites)

Can someone please respond with more information on these High threat level items?

We'll look into it but i can guarantee you that the slickdeals.net website itself does not send any malicious spyware to any of our visitors. Indeed there are cookies which are used to track your preferences (such as text size, width, if you collapsed a box, hid a message, etc).

In regards to the advertising cookies, i would venture to guess that the advertising cookies are commonplace --- most cookies are harmless and almost every site gives them out, just like we do.

For the "known bad sites", I would guess that the maker of the spyware software simply has blacklisted a majority of advertising servers such as the reported qksrv.net.

We will follow up with our advertising publishers to make sure that this is the case and that no harm comes to our visitors. Thank you for your concern.

I wouldn't get rid of all cookies anyways, some are helpful and some just taste good with milk.

Thanks for clearing it up. I wasn't too worried about the cookies. I was just wondering about the qksrv entries.

In general, I love the site, and kudos to the designers on a well designed site.

We'll look into it but i can guarantee you that the slickdeals.net website itself does not send any malicious spyware to any of our visitors. ...

I know a lot of people swear by Spyware Doctor, but I am not a fan of it. It seems to label stuff as malware that really isn't, and it seems resource intensive. I've had to remove it from a couple of systems because it messed them up.

Try: Lavasoft Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, Microsoft Defender.

Consider this thread (http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=16556&t=556661) and then do some research on the web.

Hmm, sometimes when I use kaspersky, I get a trojan_fraud thing :dontknow:

Hmm, sometimes when I use kaspersky, I get a trojan_fraud thing :dontknow:
This is a known false positive, I get it as well, has something to do with the scripts used in QuickEdit mode, it does not appear anywhere else.